SLOVENIA - Slovenia's regulation forbidding people without 'COVID certificates' from pumping fuel shows governments are getting increasingly creative in their coercion. Unfortunately, it appears the story is not a Twitter hoax. TV N1 Zagreb offers these details. “Most petrol suppliers, including the Ljubljana-based Petrol, which operates the largest number of petrol stations in the country, are rigorously applying the new restrictions, adopted on Saturday, activating fuel dispensers only after a driver presents a certificate showing that they have recovered from COVID-19, have been vaccinated, or have tested negative,” the news network reports. TV N1 Zagreb reports that the new rule will not impact drivers making international trips.

AUSTRIA - Days after Austria imposed a lockdown on the unvaccinated, it has announced a full national Covid-19 lockdown starting on Monday. Chancellor Alexander Schallenberg said it would last a maximum of 20 days and there would be a legal requirement to get vaccinated from 1 February 2022. He was responding to record case numbers and one of the lowest vaccination levels in Western Europe. Many other European countries are imposing restrictions as cases rise.

ISRAEL - The world's largest state-sponsor of terror, sworn to destroy Israel, is approaching the nuclear threshold. It's not an existential threat for the US. It is for Israel. Later this month, representatives of the world powers and Iran will meet in Vienna to discuss reviving the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action Cooperation – the Iran nuclear deal. In the runup to the talks, the United States and Israel have reiterated their determination to prevent Iran from producing nuclear weapons. Both have stated their preference for a diplomatic means of achieving that goal. But there the symmetry ends. While the United States can live with an Iran that has the ability to make a bomb but doesn’t do so, Israel simply cannot.

USA - When President Joe Biden appointed Saule Omarova to the Office of Comptroller of the Currency, it was not hard to discover that the Cornell academic held positions that were far from the American mainstream and would reset the US economy under a command-and-control model. That’s because the evidence has all been published, quite recently, in academic journals or appeared in videos accessible on YouTube. She has argued for the abolition of private sector banking, has urged that all corporate charters should be conditioned on pledges to serve bureaucrat approved purposes, and said that the bankruptcy of oil and gas companies would be welcomed.

EUROPE - The EU must quickly seal its external borders to stem the flow of migrants who are no longer welcome in the 27-member bloc, according to Slovenia’s interior minister, whose country currently holds the presidency of the EU Council. Speaking at the ‘Sarajevo Migration Dialogue’ on Thursday, Interior Minister Ales Hojs said EU countries were preoccupied recently with the coronavirus pandemic, the fall of the government in Afghanistan, and now a migrant crisis on the Poland-Belarus border, which he said was a hybrid war waged by Minsk against the EU. The Slovenian minister said the current situation was similar to the 2015 influx of refugees and migrants from the Middle East and North Africa, when the EU admitted over one million people across its borders. This time the situation is different, Hojs said, warning that “there is no more ‘refugees welcome.’”

USA - Wait times at LA Port: Normal times = 0. Currently 17 days and grasping towards chaos. 83 vessels in the queue. More arriving everyday means wait time for them is easily going to hit 21 maybe even 28 days. This Is Very Very Very Bad.

MIDDLE EAST - Over the past 15 years, Israel has worked intensively on an alliance of Arab Gulf states against Iran. The current reconciliation between Saudi Arabia and Iran could finally herald the end of this diplomacy. The proxy wars between Saudi Arabia and Iran, whether in Lebanon or Yemen, could come to an end in the face of a possible reconciliation between the two rival states. This would have far-reaching positive consequences for the entire region, one which is usually more likely to make headlines with war. But this won’t be thanks to the UN, the US, or the EU, despite their multiple special envoys to the Middle East. It is the regional powers that are taking matters into their own hands, with their latest meeting having taken place in Baghdad in late September. While the US has to say goodbye to the region after twenty years and deal with many foreign policy debacles such as in Afghanistan, the regional powers are gaining self-confidence and an increased sphere of influence. What has transpired so far in official reports gives cause for hope.

GERMANY - Released on Thursday, the 600-page report was compiled by historian Friedrich Kiessling and legal scholar Christoph Safferling, and covers the Cold War period running from the early 1950s until 1974. The work was commissioned by the federal prosecutor’s office. The researchers found that, at one point during the 1950s, roughly three in four top officials in the federal prosecutor’s office had been members of the Nazi Party. It took until 1972 before former Nazis were no longer in the majority in that office, and until 1992 before the judicial system had been fully purged of ex-members of the fascist party. “There was no break, let alone a conscious break, with the Nazi past,” the researchers said of the situation. Presenting the inquiry’s findings, state secretary at the justice ministry Margaretha Sudhof said the country has “long remained blind” to the presence of ex-Nazis in senior positions after the end of the Second World War.

CANADA - Jordan Peterson says he spoke to a senior government adviser who told him Canada’s COVID restriction policies are completely driven by opinion polls and not science. “In relation to the COVID restrictions, I talked to a senior adviser to one of the provincial governments a couple of weeks ago,” said Peterson. “He told me flat out that the COVID policy here is driven by nothing but opinion polls related to the popularity of the government,” he added. “No science, no endgame in sight, no real plan, and so what that means is that the part of the population that is most afraid of COVID,” are driving the policy. Peterson pointed to figures that prove people vastly exaggerate the risk of being hospitalized by COVID due to relentless government fearmongering campaigns. Governments scare the living hell out of citizens to elicit a fear reaction, then point to poll numbers calling for more lockdown measures in order to justify more lockdown measures.

RUSSIA/CHINA - Russia and China have struck up an alarming pact after an expert told Express.co.uk that this week's missile weapons test "cements Sino-Russian cooperation in space". It comes after Russia blew up one of their old satellites in a missile test in space that sent space debris whizzing past the International Space Station (ISS). The move forced NASA astronauts to take cover in their spaceships and sparked fury in Washington with the debris also threatening China’s space station, Tiangong. But Brandon Weichert, author of Winning Space: How America Remains a Superpower, told Express.co.uk that the move will only deepen the cooperation between two of the West's biggest adversaries. He said: “If anything this is going to cement Sino-Russian cooperation in space. Technically, Russia is the second-best space power behind the US and slightly ahead of China."

USA - The budget reconciliation package pushed by Democrats creates a new expanded child tax credit (CTC) that would pay illegal immigrants some $10.5 billion next year. All immigrants with children are eligible, regardless of how they got here and whether their children are US-born. This includes the roughly 600,000 unaccompanied minors and persons in family units stopped at the border in FY2021 and released into the country pending a hearing. Cash welfare to illegal immigrants is not just costly; it also encourages more illegal immigration. Although it is referred to as a “refundable credit,” the new CTC, like the old additional child tax credit (ACTC) it replaces, pays cash to low-income families who do not pay any federal income tax. The new program significantly increases the maximum cash payment from $1,400 per child to $3,600 for children under 6, and to $3,000 for children ages 6 to 17. After 2022, the maximum payment would be $2,000 per child, but advocates hope the much larger payments will be extended.

USA - Some 100,306 Americans lost their lives to drug overdoses in the 12 months leading up to April 2021, according to figures released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Opioids were responsible for just over three-quarters of these deaths, with synthetic opioids – including fentanyl, a drug 50 times more potent than heroin – responsible for more than six in 10 fatalities. In a statement marking the “tragic milestone,” President Joe Biden said his administration is “doing everything in our power to address addiction and end the overdose epidemic.” To that end, he pledged to deliver better healthcare and mental health services, and boasted that his American Rescue Plan has already delivered nearly $4 billion “to strengthen and expand services for substance use disorder.”

USA - Here are some comments from ex-President Trump. “They [Big Media] has one subject they don’t want to talk about – the 2020 Election scam. It all involves around that. We’re not going to have a country in three years. This guy did this in nine months. He destroyed our country. You know I say Make America Great Again. That was my theme and it was going to be Keep America Great. I gave that away… America’s not great now. America is a laughing stock all over the world. At first, I thought they were incompetent and now I realize they want it [the Southern Border] open. Look at the money they make. They’re full time politicians. Pelosi, and all these people, Waters, Obama. I expected to lose a lot of money. I lost millions. I expected that. I was ok. These people made money being President. I don’t think it’s a 50/50 country. When you have things like voter ID, defund the police, open borders, sanctuary cities, all of the stuff they have. I don’t believe 50% of the people vote for them. I think they cheat on elections, and they do other things, and that gets them up to that 50%. But they can’t have 50% with those policies.”

USA - Last year a US general made an ominous revelation: two Russian satellites in orbit were stalking a US spy satellite high above the earth. It wasn't clear if the Cosmos satellites could attack US-245, an American surveillance spacecraft. "It has the potential to create a dangerous situation in space," said General Jay Raymond, head of the Pentagon's Space Command. The incident passed, but it marked a new stage in the mounting arms race in space, where potentially bomb-armed satellites, laser-shooting spacecraft and other technologies have moved from science fiction to reality. The stakes were made clear Monday when Russia launched a missile from Earth and blasted to pieces one of its satellites in a show of force. NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg called the act "reckless." "It demonstrates that Russia is now developing new weapons systems that can shoot down satellites," he said at a meeting Tuesday with EU defense ministers.

EUROPE - The EU is risking backtracking on its climate targets after Russia's gas squeeze on the bloc has reportedly brought the dirtiest fossil fuel back into action. The Kremlin tightened supplies of gas flowing into Europe while it awaited the approval of the new Nord Stream 2 pipeline in the hope of speeding up the certification process. But instead, the German regulators suspended the approval of the system, which is supposed to transit gas from Russia into Germany, bypassing Poland and Ukraine. This move could further anger Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose next move could cause even more damage to the EU if it decides to use its vast network of pipelines to restrict more gas transiting into the bloc. Europe’s gas prices have skyrocketed to record highs overnight and now some countries are said to be ready to return to coal-burning after fears of energy shortages soared.